President receives Volumes 1&2 of Late President Janet Jagan’s speeches

President Donald Ramotar today received a courtesy call from Professor David Dabydeen, Head of the Caribbean Press and Guyana’s Ambassador to China, during which the Head of State was presented with a copy each of Volumes 1 and 2 of the late President Janet Jagan’s speeches in the National Assembly, the preface for which was authored by President Ramotar.

Professor Dabydeen also presented the Head of State a copy of his latest novel ‘Johnson’s Dictionary’.

President Donald Ramotar receives a copy each of Volumes

1 and 2 of the speeches of the late President Janet Jagan

from the books editor, and Head of the Caribbean Press,

Professor David Dabydeen

In an invited comment by the Government Information Agency, Professor Dabydeen said a batch of the two volumes is on its way to Guyana via sea.

Mrs Jagan was President from December 19, 1997, to August 11, 1999. She previously served as Prime Minister of Guyana from March 17, 1997, to December 19, 1997.

Professor David Dabydeen presents a copy of his latest

novel ‘Johnson’s Dictionary’ to President Donald Ramotar

On Monday, Professor Dabydeen presented the initial volume of speeches of the late former President Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham to Speaker of the National Assembly Raphael Trotman at Parliament building.

Giving an insight into his latest novel, Professor Dabydeen said, “It’s about the journey taken from the days of slavery and indentured-ship, when they were barely literate in the English Language to the point at which they won the Nobel peace prize for Literature twice, so that’s the role of Johnson’s Dictionary in the way we achieved literary and linguistic excellence.”

The back cover of the book reads:  Told by Manu, this novel journeys through 18th-century London and Demerara in British Guiana, recounting experiences that might be dreamed or remembered. With a diverse cast–including slaves, lowly women on the make, lustful overseers, sodomites, and pious Jews–these characters come alive from artist William Hogarth’s engravings; Hogarth himself also appears as a drunkard official artist in Demerara, from whom the slave Cato steals his skills and discovers a way of remaking his world. From the dens of sexual specialties, where the ex-slave Francis conducts a highly popular flagellant mission to cure his clients of their man-love and preach abolition, to the sugar estates of Demerara, this novel revels in the connections of empire, art, literature, and human desire in ways that are comic, salutary, and redemptive.